Self-Powered Height Sensor With ZigBee Networks for Intelligent Systems

With the development of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless communication technology, and embedded systems, wireless sensor network (WSN) has been a focus for research among various fields. Wireless sensor technology inspires many innovations for industrial applications and medical robots, and breaks many limitations and inconvenience for such sensing devices. A self-powered height sensing system with ZigBee technology is presented. It specifically targets to replace an original wired system with an integrated wireless sensor that is comprised of all necessary parts: sensing module, processing module, RF transceiver, and power supply. First, the authors present the system framework design including the layout of a wireless sensor node based on ZigBee. Second, with the vibration environment, a self-powered generator was developed through the comparison between piezoelectric and electromagnetic generation. Then several experiments are conducted to test and analyze the feasibility of the whole system. Finally, a future upgraded design is proposed to improve system performance.